There are generally two kinds of writers: those who outline, and those who fly blind. If, like me, you’re a blind flyer, there are ways to use your bat sense to detect the shape of things around you and navigate without taking wrong turns.
You start with whatever you know, which may or may not be the beginning. From that vantage point, you can see the next critical event. Logical steps will lead up to that event, so you lay the groundwork for it and build towards that climactic moment. (I write a list of scenes I know have to happen on the way to the next big scene) Once you reach The Big Scene, you pull out all the stops and give it everything you’ve got. The Big Scene shouldn’t be tiptoed around.
Then what? After the Big Scene is done, you can see far enough ahead to know what the next Big Scene will be, and the logical steps in between where you are now and where that is, and build towards it. And so on until you’re done.
I got this (and many other handy plot tools) from Plot by Ansen Dibell. Great book!
Does it actually work? Yes. I started Dangerous Games with an image of two people meeting on a
deserted stretch of highway, a man on a motorcycle and a woman in a broken-down car. That was the sum total of what I knew. What’s beautiful about this method isn’t that I finished the book, because I always do, it’s that I did it without throwing away 50-100 pages of wrong turns and blind alleys. I threw away a list of potential scenes I ended up not using because as the story structure unfolded, they didn’t fit; a waste of 50-100 words instead of pages.
And now I’ll go focus my bat sense on my current story. I know this isn’t the gunfight/love scene blog entry alluded to previously, but it’s what was on my mind this morning.
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